I was 2 steps from Paradise
by reflecting
Summary: In answer to 2 prompts on the KKBB kink meme. Harry never stops talking, and Perry is a secret romantic...WIP. Harry/Perry.


**Fandom: **KKBB

**Pairing: **Harry/Perry

**Rating: **R to possible NC-17

**Warnings: **It's been a while since I wrote for this fandom, English isn't my first language so although it's been proof read by my lovely friend EclecticRegard (Shizuka-Ame), please consider any errors left as mine.

**Notes: **Response to two prompts at the KKBB kink meme; the first part is for the prompt "Harry/Perry. Harry _never stops talking." _The second part will be for the prompt "" Ah you know Perry's a secret romantic. We all know. Except Harry, who sadly resigned himself to life as a fuck on the side, and never stays a full night. Perry sets about rectifying the situation. Angst, fluff, porn, you decide!".

Perhaps not quite what the OP wanted, but I did my best. My muse cannot be tamed, sadly.

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><p><strong>I was 2 steps from Paradise<strong>

_Right, so I'm actually fucking doing this. I can't believe—fuck, why not. It's not like I have any damn sanity left, or else I wouldn't be here at all. Had I any sense to spare, I would never have let this happen. But if there's anyone who can defy nature and reality, it is Harry. Oh yes; he'd give Darwin a fucking ulcer before driving the man to kill himself. The stupid shit has driven me close to doing the same way too fucking often. He's a menace: everything is his fault. One way or another, everything boils down to him._

_That way of thinking is probably what started it all, come to think of it. Well, fuck, it wasn't like a gun went off and signaled the start of the bloody race. However, that might be a good place to begin with. I don't know when it clicked, when the scale tipped. I don't think there was a moment. But there was, as there always is, an actual gun, an actual shot, and Harry. In the same time and place, with the usual fucked up mortal perils and dumb fucking luck._

_So fuck it, I can regret this later, but here's the story – if you can call it that – of how Harry completely fucked up my life, and how I (stupid fuck that I am) didn't really give a shit._

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><p><strong>1. Talk to Me<strong>

They were tailing a man through the park – the same park where shit had gone down a year before. A whole year, he muses. Damn but time really flies nowadays, Perry admits with a grimace. It wasn't always good; Harry getting himself into trouble, losing days and hours in storage containers and hospitals, and always dragging Perry with him.

Being a private detective had never been all that exciting, really, just the occasional fuck-all case going to hell with drugs and guns and blood and filthy amounts of money. He used to know when to fuck off, when it was a lost cause and it was better to just turn a blind fucking eye. Until Harry, the stupid pawn in a dangerous game that ended up trapping the king for its killing. He'd made Perry do things he hadn't done for a long while (before he became jaded and cynical, which was…oh, he can't really remember anymore). He made him see it through, despite the near deaths, and all simply because the little righteous idiot wouldn't give up even with a missing finger and electric shocks to his balls. Ridiculous, that a naïve, petty thief had changed his world so much.

Perry no longer lived alone, he no longer worked alone (unless he locked Harry inside long enough to get a head start and disappear before the man picked the lock to follow him). He made another person breakfast, he worried about someone else - which he justified by thinking no one, least of all Harry, really worried about the man anyway. He even tolerated things he had never before had time or patience to acknowledge with more than a fist to someone's face. Stupidity (like a child's, completely frustrating in how you could only be angry for a little while, how it was always forgiven for the few bursts of intelligence that appeared every now and then), and most importantly, _talking._ Not banter, not arguments, not greetings or such, but the nonsense babbling that should only be acceptable in the bedroom when someone is fucking your brains out and the brain-to-mouth filter is offline.

Harry, however, did not seem to have a filter at all.

So they found themselves in the park again, a year later, tailing a tall freak of a man in a long, black trench coat in the middle of the night. And Harry was, for all intents and purposes, completely set on giving their position away by keeping up a whispered monologue of nonsense.

"-but why would he go here, his contact is on the other side of town, and what kind of coat is that? It screams _suspicious man with possibly bad intentions!_ Hey, Perry, do you know what brand it is? Can you tell? Remember that woman last week? How you saw she had fake Prada? Yeah, that was pretty cool. Solved the case on a pair of shoes – do you think the coat will be important? Perry, your eye is twitching again; I told you we should've brought some coffee along you always get pissy when-"

He had tried, many times since Harry ended up being a part of daily life, to get him to shut the fuck up. He really had. Hand over mouth, elbow in ribs, duct tape (he'd even contemplated getting out his old gag ball from a memorable relationship), but it never yielded the desired results. It was quiet, for a while, but he always went off again. No filter, a constant stream of consciousness spilling out of a mouth that never seemed to give it a fucking rest. It hadn't taken long, what with the idea of the gag ball, before murderous fantasies (cutting out his tongue, sewing his mouth shut, drug him up and send him off to have his vocal cords removed) had morphed into morbidly fascinating ones.

Well, morbid, at first, because Harry was straight, and to imagine shoving his dick into his mouth to stop the constant flow of words was not just satisfying because Harry's mouth was a sin but because he would gag and say _please no_ and it would be easy to have him promise to shut up. Morbid, yes. Wrong, yes. At first, before the fantasies weren't about forcing him anymore, not so much _gagging_ as _gagging for_, and then there were kisses involved (he didn't need to imagine that, had already tasted him), and teeth, and hands and Perry's silk sheets and Harry's mussed hair or wet skin in a shower.

It was rather pathetic how quickly it had turned on him, and he was left fighting down a hard-on as Harry's mouth set off on a vocal flood which Perry now associated with the kind of thoughts where his dick was choking him to silence, or his mouth was swallowing every word until there were no left. Pathetic, but not too much of a surprise. Hate – and he did hate it when Harry would not shut up – was as passionate a feeling as any. And Harry was easy to lust after, considering (so needy without realizing it, fragile yet picking fights and not lying down to take the abuse, needing someone to worry, to fuss, and Perry did, in his own way, with swearing and slaps to the back of his head, band aids, locked doors and hospitals).

And so Perry bit his tongue, shoved an elbow into Harry's ribs, and carried on. The man in the trench coat was turning, soon at the point of drop-off according to his sources and Harry finally stopped talking for a while and worried his lip instead. Small mercies, Perry reminded himself; he refused to look down on teeth and wet lips, small mercies.

And then, there was a shot.

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><p>They wrapped up the case rather quickly after that. After Harry folding over, clutching his side, and Perry shattering kneecaps with three precise shots (one missing by a few inches, but the man was moving about most annoyingly), there were phone calls, for an ambulance and to clients and the proper police contacts. A quick check-up and a few bandages, followed by some smooth talk and wielding of a badge, a trip to the police station to visit a friend that had them out of there within a few minutes, and then they were on their way home a little high on adrenaline and pain and medication (well, only adrenaline on his part).<p>

The talking began again, as soon as they settled into the cab, and showed no sign of stopping completely apart from the lulls in conversation where breath was needed or distraction interfered. Perry pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. He'd tried yelling, tried asking nicely, tried threats he had even carried out (to some extents). Infuriating. Impossible. Fucked up.

When they came home, Perry was more than ready to collapse in his bed and have a good fucking wank to the wistful thoughts of claiming that relentless mouth and, for lack of a less clichéd description, put it to better use. Harry, as was his damned wont at the worst of times, had other ideas.

"You know, um, thanks for, well, _that,_" he began. Well, beginning would mean he'd stopped long enough to end something, which Perry was certain he hadn't, since he thought he could still hear the grocery list Harry had been reciting as they'd walked past the kitchen echoing in his mind. And to say Perry snapped in reply would also imply that he hadn't already been pushed beyond human capabilities, really.

"What _now?"_

He'd spun around to glare at him as Harry fidgeted before him, having followed him to his bedroom door like an excited puppy (pawing for scraps of affection, whining for attention, ridiculously pleased when awarded; quite impossible to ignore). He cleared his throat under his glare and attempted a smile, which did not, Perry thought with a growl of impatience, help matters at all (those _lips_).

"Just wanted to, you know, thank you for doing what you did. After I got shot, I mean. You do stuff like that. Usually people run. I don't say it enough, it's kinda hard to say thanks to someone like you, you know, so just…well. Thanks for, you know, never running."

He was about to take another breath to start again with the never ending _talking_, Perry knew. He wasn't a saint. He was tired, he didn't like the thought of Harry being left behind as people ran away (Harmony, ex-wife, Harmony again, and more he didn't know of before and in-between), and really, one shouldn't expect so much out of him. A whole fucking year. That's enough restraint, thank you.

So he kissed him, hard, with a hand on his neck and the other on the small of his back to pull him close and crush him ruthlessly against his body. Harry gasped in surprise, much as he had done the first time this had happened (glorious, words swallowed and controlled, finally), but this time was different. This time there were no cops, no corpse, no Harmony. And so he pushed his tongue inside parted, slack lips and marveled at the sharp jolt of arousal that set his nerves on fire. There were no struggles this time, just shocked immobility, no response except for an instinctual tilt of the head.

Wrenching himself away before awareness kicked in, Perry sucked in a sharp breath of air before looking down into the face of his friend, colleague and housemate. Wide, brown eyes (a puppy's eyes, dammit) and a slack, wet mouth that would haunt him for the rest of his life met his gaze. Well, fuck.

He pushed him away, much more gently than he had intended, and promptly turned to wrench open his bedroom door and close it with a loud _SLAM_. He locked it, just because, and rested his forehead against the cool wood as he listened for any movement outside, waiting for the talking to start up again (anger, teasing, confusion; anything).

It didn't.

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><p>It took him two days to realize the kiss had worked in the way he had first wished it would. Harry had not talked, not in his usual way, since it happened. There was still no filter, but there seemed to be a stop button somewhere which Harry had learned to utilize. Instead, however, there were those <em>looks<em>. More focused than before, more frequent. Harry's face bore the signs of contemplation, which meant he walked around looking a bit constipated and confused, but determined and stubborn all the same. Perry wasn't sure if he preferred this over the talking.

They didn't do or say anything about that kiss for over a week and, all the while, Perry grew more and more uneasy and suspicious of Harry's behavior. It was like something was changing, without his permission; like Harry knew something he didn't, which was absurd. He always fucking knew; Harry was an open book. An open book with bad grammar and typos, but all the same…

Then, they were outside his bedroom again and this time, it was Harry's lips on his, Harry's hands on him, Harry pressing him against his chest and Harry swallowing cries of surprised pleasure. It was ridiculous, of course. The man was on his tip-toes, overcompensating in strength because in his mind male and female were probably supposed to be entirely different, and there most likely was not a category of information simply labeled "kissing". This was when his brained kicked to life and mouths were ripped apart and grinding hips (when did that happen?) where forcefully and reluctantly stilled.

"What the fuck—" he began, but Harry beat him to it.

"-you're hot," he said, flushing as he frowned. "I mean, well, I didn't-that is, I like you and having you kiss me wasn't that bad, so I was thinking, since it makes me want to—I don't know, bend you over a table, shit, I don't know-I thought I'm probably not as straight as I should be. There's you, I mean, you're….I'm not gay. But I think, for you, I am, perhaps-well," he bit his lip, "you make me want to kiss you. And other stuff. I think. Maybe? Can we try? God, I'm too horny to think, just say something for fuck's sake-"

It was a bit more than he could take, realizing that he could shut him up, that he could kiss him and feel the unmistakable press of an erection against his thigh and bury his hands in messy, soft hair with answering lips against his own and nine fingers slipping underneath his shirt to claw at his back. Realizing that here was a chance to correct some of the grammar in this book, some of the typos, write some lines himself.

Harry bit his lip and moaned, rutting against him, and it was with a growl of heated arousal that Perry wrenched his bedroom door open while promising himself he would have Harry craving his touch by the end of the night, would have him here every night. His tongue in his mouth, his teeth on his shoulder; he'd have him _gagging _on _pleasure, _incoherent with the best type of noise.

By the time Perry came down from the most intense orgasm he'd had in fucking years, Harry was already limp underneath him and smiling the smile of the well-fucked; languid and ready for sleep. It didn't take him long to follow, settling down beside him and ignoring the sticky mess they'd made out of themselves in favor of instead waking together for a joint shower sometime _next week_ (so exhausted; he hadn't been this fucked up in mind and body for, well, he couldn't really remember).

It was, therefore, a profound disappointment to find himself alone in bed come morning, with only the scent of musky male sex in the air and a couple of brown strands of hair on his pillow left of a stray Harry. That, he thought, would just not fucking_ do_.

**TBC...**


End file.
